Jeff Weintraub

Monday, November 30, 2009

Who is Mr. (or Mrs.) Republican - Washington Post poll

David Frum highlights some items in a recent Washington Posttelephone poll that provide intriguing and thought-provoking indications of Republicans' current state of mind.

In one question, Republicans (that is, registered Republicans plus "Republican-leaning nonpartisans") were asked: "Thinking about Republican leaders today - which one person best reflects the core values of the Republican Party?" Here are the top 10 responses (out of 26 names listed, followed by 8% for "There is no leader," 9% for "Other," and 20% with "No opinion):

The fact that one has to go 10 names down the list to get to George W. Bush's 1% (in a poll of Republicans!) is a pretty striking sign of how thoroughly Bush and his standing have been eclipsed less than a year after he was President. Or so it seems to me. And it's hard to avoid concluding that even Republicans don't have a very favorable retrospective judgment on the Bush II presidency.

(When asked "How much, if at all, do you blame George W. Bush for current problems that the Republican Party may be having?", a total of 69% of Republicans answered either "some," "a good amount," or "a great deal." It's true that 30% assigned Bush "hardly any" blame. What on earth were they thinking?)

The fact that the appalling Sarah Palin was solidly in first place is not surprising, unfortunately, but still astonishing.

=> Another item brings out the intensity of political polarization among Republicans. When Republicans were asked, "How do you personally feel about the Obama administration's policies?", perhaps it's not surprising that only 11% declared themselves either pleased or "Satisfied". What is probably more revealing is that, among the 89% who expressed a negative opinion, 43% described themselves as "Dissatisfied," whereas 46% called themselves "Angry."

Those responses help to explain why Frum's column is titled "We're Mad As Hell ..." (If I were in a facetious mood, I might suggesting adding the subtitle, "And We're Also Mad As Hatters ...", but I will resist the temptation.) These are definitely an angry, unhappy, and grumpy bunch of people.

Frum (who his doing his best these days to carve out a role as the Voice of Reason in conservative/Republican punditry) does add this perceptive speculation:

Yet one has to wonder: how much of the anger felt by Republicans is explained by things Obama has actually done – and how much by the generally miserable situation of the country. Republicans have 401Ks too.

But whom else do they have to blame (since disillusionment with George W. Bush will yield only so much emotional satisfaction at this point)? So all this anger, both concrete and free-floating, is getting focused on Obama and the Democratic Congress ... which may at least partly help to explain the undertone of hysteria and paranoia in a lot of American political discourse over the past 9 months or so. It's plausible.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Which foreign country do Afghans hate the most?

For anyone who has been following Afghanistan at all during the past decade and a half, that's not a trick question. In an earlier post I mentioned in passing the ABC/BBC/ARD national public opinion poll in Afghanistan, released in February 2009. Question #38 asked: “Now I’m going to ask what you think about some people and groups. Is your opinion of [INSERT] very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable?”

In 2007, according to previous poll results used for comparison, 80% expressed an "unfavorable" opinion of Pakistan, which was already the highest percentage by far for any foreign country. Since then, Afghan hostility toward Pakistan seems to have increased even further.

None of this is surprising, but the reasons are worth underlining. Back in the 1990s, the Pakistani military and security services played a major role in sponsoring, supplying, and supporting the Taliban and helping it seize control of (about 90% of) Afghanistan. Pakistan was one of only three foreign countries to recognize the Taliban regime (the other two were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates). Since the Taliban lost control of Afghanistan in 2001, its base has been in the border regions of Pakistan. And most Afghans believe (correctly) that at the very least the Pakistani government and military have been allowing the Afghan Taliban to operate from Pakistan, and that at least some tendencies within the Pakistani security apparatus have continued actively supporting them.

In fact, many--if not most--Pakistanis are still angry (or enraged) with the US for having overthrown the Taliban regime in 2001. This attitude needs to be recognized as a significant social fact about Pakistani public opinion, but I think it is also fair to describe it as morally and politically despicable. At all events, it is not an attitude shared by most Afghans.

Why do Afghans express such positive feelings toward India? The only plausible explanation, I'm sure, is the antagonism between India and Pakistan. If those favorable attitudes toward India worry Pakistanis--who are concerned, for understandable reasons, about possibilities for Indian influence in Afghanistan--they should consider how their own country's policies have helped to promote them.

=> As long as we are trying to read the tea leaves from polling results to get a sense of how Afghans see things, a few other points from this ABC/BBC/ARD survey might be worth considering.

Afghans' feelings about the US look positive compared to their feelings about Pakistan, but everything's relative. In the country-by-country ratings tracked by this and previous polls, "favorable" attitudes toward the US have declined from 83% in 2005 to 74% in 2006, 65% in 2007, to 47% in 2009. As the ABC/BBC/ARD poll report properly emphasized, the latest results marked the first time when negative attitudes toward the US exceeded positive ones. This is a big deal. And and this downward drift (or plunge) is linked to some larger trends with genuinely alarming implications.

The United States, its NATO allies and the government of Hamid Karzai are losing not just ground in Afghanistan – but also the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.

A new national public opinion poll in Afghanistan by ABC News, the BBC and ARD German TV finds that performance ratings and support levels for the Kabul government and its Western allies have plummeted from their peaks, particularly in the past year. Widespread strife, a resurgent Taliban, struggling development, soaring corruption and broad complaints about food, fuel, power and prices all play a role.

On the other hand, to get a sense of the full picture, it's also important to pay attention to some other points that emerge from the ABC/BBC/ARD poll results. One is that, according to this poll and all other available evidence, the great majority of Afghans do not want the Taliban to win.

Question #11 asked: "Which of the following do you think poses the biggest danger in our country?" The clear winner was the Taliban, at 58%. By comparison, 13% picked drug traffickers, 8% picked the US, and 1% [sic] picked the current Afghan government.

Question #10 asked: "Who would you rather have ruling Afghanistan today?"
Current Government: 82%
Taliban: 4%

And even though Afghans are increasingly unhappy with the US, when respondents were asked which foreign countries are "playing a positive, neutral, or negative role in Afghanistan now?" (Question #39), more of them still rated the US role favorably than rated it unfavorably--though the margin is shrinking. ("Neutral" and "no opinion" percentages are left out here.)

=> It seems evident that most Afghans are not clamoring for the US and its allies to leave them in the lurch. And while we should be clear-sighted about how terrible things are in Afghanistan right now, a genuinely honest discussion also has to recognize that, for most Afghans, conditions are much better than they were under the Taliban. All the evidence points that way--even infant mortality figures--and Afghans say so themselves when asked.

In the end, of course, what Afghans do or don't want (or even which policies would be more or less disastrous for Afghans themselves) amounts to only one factor in deciding what the US, the Europeans, and other outside actors can and should do.

It may be that at this point Afghanistan is in an irreversible downward spiral, and there is no realistic hope for reversing this--at least, given the necessary human, financial, and political costs. In that case, any moral obligations that the US might have not to abandon the Afghan people become irrelevant, and we should decide to cut our losses and start heading for the exit. Many claims that the situation is hopeless strike me as reflexive sloganeering (which doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong). But informed analysts who are worth taking seriously, like Patrick Cockburn (not to be confused with is appalling brother Alexander Cockburn), have argued that it is "Time to Leave". I don't find such conclusions entirely convincing, but they can't simply be dismissed.

On the other hand, other serious, informed, and generally acute analysts, including Peter Bergen, Ahmed Rashid, and Trudy Rubin, have been making cogent arguments that point in the opposite direction. Just for example, here is what Ahmed Rashid said at one point in his October 8 New York Review of Books piece on Afghanistan & Pakistan:

With Obama's plan the US will be taking Afghanistan seriously for the first time since 2001; if it is to be successful it will need not only time but international and US support—both open to question. [....]

Across the region many people fear that the US and NATO may start to pull out of Afghanistan during the next twelve months despite their uncompleted mission. That would almost certainly result in the Taliban walking into Kabul. Al-Qaeda would be in a stronger position to launch global terrorist attacks. The Pakistani Taliban would be able to "liberate" large parts of Pakistan. The Taliban's game plan of waiting out the Americans now looks more plausible than ever.

Is this obviously wrong? I'm not so sure.

The stakes are very high, for Afghans and for the rest of us. I wish I were as certain of the right answer as many people on different sides of this debate seem to be. But if Americans and Europeans do decide that abandoning Afghanistan makes the most sense from considerations of "national interest" or realpolitik, at least we shouldn't pretend that this is what most Afghans actually want, or that we're doing it for their benefit.

Darfur, the Arab world, and the alleged international community - Some things we think but do not say (Joseph Britt)

Back in August 2005 Joseph Britt, who was guest-posting for a while on Dan Drezner's old blog, wrote a penetrating piece that cut right through a lot of prevailing bullshit, evasiveness, and pseudo-sophisticated doubletalk. What he had to say was important and on-target then ... and I am reminded it of because it remains important and on-target now.

=> Since some of the issues raised by Britt in that piece are potentially inflammatory and open to distortion or misuse, it is probably worth adding something about this key passage in his discussion:

What do we think but do not say? Well, for starters, we think that Arabs do not care very much about human rights. To be more precise, and more accurate, Arabs feel deep and genuine outrage when an Arab male is treated with something less than respect by a non-Arab and especially by a Jew; Arabs mistreated by other Arabs are of less concern. Non-Arabs being shot, blown-up, gang-raped or starved by Arabs are no problem at all, whether they are Muslim or not and perhaps especially if they are black Africans.

First, I think it is important to emphasize that if this passage were taken entirely literally, it would be deeply unfair to some Arabs and to some sectors of Arab public opinion. But with respect to the broad pattern of responses to the Darfur atrocity by Arab governments and by the great bulk of Arab public opinion (and to other mass atrocities committed against non-Arab populations, like Saddam Hussein's genocidal assault on Iraqi Kurds in 1988), it is hard to see it as either unfair or inaccurate. (For some further background, see here; and for some expressions of outrage by the Nigerian writer, political activist, and public intellectual Wole Soyinka that are less measured in tone than Britt's piece, see here & here.)

Second, Britt has definitely captured some basic premises underlying what a wide range of people, across the ideological spectrum, think about Arab public opinion, whether or not they put it so explicitly. (And that includes pseudo-sophisticated invocations of Arab rage or humiliation to explain why support for terrorist attacks against civilians is 'understandable' and condemning them is pointless. Of course, people who make such arguments often think of themselves as pro-Arab.) This is worth pondering.

=> Those who read through Britt's discussion to the end will notice that he himself is careful to add the following clarification:

Now, it is very likely that the great majority of people in the Arab countries do not support genocide in Darfur. Many of them may not even know where it is. It is not something that the media available in Arab countries has covered extensively. And silence by Arab governments and media has not been challenged by Western governments and media

And furthermore, is this an exclusively Arab phenomenon?

Are we talking fundamentally about an Arab issue here? Looked at globally, we are not.

Nevertheless,

Arab indifference to Arab genocide does not, of course, excuse inadequate efforts by Western countries to aid its victims. Nor does South Africa's weak and cowardly support of Zimbabwe's kleptocrats or Beijing's embrace of its comrade in Pyongyang mean the West has no responsibilities in these situations. But surely one of those responsibilities is to lay aside our reflexive political correctness and say something about the things we know to be true.

Somewhere in the field of American foreign policy there is room for a paper with the title of that document with which Tom Cruise's character Jerry MacGuire began a major career transition. The subject of the paper would be human rights catastrophes in what used to be known as the Third World, particularly the genocide in Darfur.

What do we think but do not say? Well, for starters, we think that Arabs do not care very much about human rights. To be more precise, and more accurate, Arabs feel deep and genuine outrage when an Arab male is treated with something less than respect by a non-Arab and especially by a Jew; Arabs mistreated by other Arabs are of less concern. Non-Arabs being shot, blown-up, gang-raped or starved by Arabs are no problem at all, whether they are Muslim or not and perhaps especially if they are black Africans.

Many cultural attitudes, including this one, have deep historic roots; these are not my primary concern here. What matters instead is that keeping silent about large things carries a heavy price.

The New Republic ran a useful primer on the Darfur situation on its web site a short while ago, by Smith College Professor Eric Reeves; his assessment of where things stand now in Sudan -- this also contains material on the north-south civil war that has gone on there since the early 1980s -- is well worth reading as well.

Reeves is an expert on this subject; I am not. Yet even Reeves fails to note what to the casual observer appears fairly central to this grim story -- namely, that the protracted war against a civilian population of Darfur is considered an outrage, a horror, and an affront to humanity by the United States, by European peoples and governments, and by several African states, but by no Arab government and hardly any Arab media. Arabs are not represented among relief workers or peacekeepers in Darfur, all of whom come from countries much farther away than Egypt or Saudi Arabia; Arab contributions to humanitarian relief funds, according to a UN report, have been negligible. Terrorism has, rather late in the day, become a major issue of Arab Muslim theologians and intellectuals; not so genocide carried out by Arab Muslims against a mostly Muslim population over more than two years.

Let us note the most obvious consequence of this before saying anything else -- it makes action to stop genocide exponentially more difficult for the United States and other countries who would like to when the Arab government in Khartoum feels no pressure from other Arab governments or Arab media. This is true intellectually and morally; it is also true physically, since humanitarian relief and peacekeeping in Darfur cannot stage through nearby Egypt or Libya and must instead be maintained across the whole breadth of the Sahara Desert, like a dumbbell held at arm's length.

Now, it is very likely that the great majority of people in the Arab countries do not support genocide in Darfur. Many of them may not even know where it is. It is not something that the media available in Arab countries has covered extensively. And silence by Arab governments and media has not been challenged by Western governments and media.

I don't mean to pick on The New York Times here; there are worse offenders. But it does seem oddly symbolic that of the two Times columnists who write most frequently about the Arab world one -- Nick Kristof -- has published many pieces about genocide in Darfur without ever writing one about Arab indifference to it or what that might mean, while the other --Tom Friedman -- writes "whither the Arabs" commentary regularly without mentioning Darfur at all.

With respect to governments, it is tempting to suggest that this would be a good subject on which to unleash one of John Bolton's famous tirades on the United Nations. There is no reason, though, that other governments must be silent unless the United States speaks. Distasteful and occasionally repellent though the task can be, the United States often has to do business with the more barbarous governments of the world -- it was central to brokering the fragile settlement of Sudan's north-south civil war, for example. It should not be too much to expect Canada, say, or Germany to do something useful for a change and challenge Arab indifference to genocide in the UN or some other international forum.

Are we talking fundamentally about an Arab issue here? Looked at globally, we are not. Other human rights disasters are taking place as I write this -- the destruction of Zimbabwe, the decades-long nightmare of North Korea -- and the conduct of South Africa and China, respectively, toward these situations is inexplicable without mention of the indifference of these governments to human rights and human suffering. A humane, stable world order is unlikely to establish itself if only North American, European and a few other governments are willing to build it. And that is the case right now.

Arab indifference to Arab genocide does not, of course, excuse inadequate efforts by Western countries to aid its victims. Nor does South Africa's weak and cowardly support of Zimbabwe's kleptocrats or Beijing's embrace of its comrade in Pyongyang mean the West has no responsibilities in these situations. But surely one of those responsibilities is to lay aside our reflexive political correctness and say something about the things we know to be true.

Politics, religion and soccer in Iraq

It would probably be an exaggeration to describe soccer as one of the world religions, but sometimes one has to wonder.

Since 2003 the jihadists of the so-called Sunni Arab "insurgency" (or, if one prefers, "resistance") have murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and they have shown no compunction about blowing up mosques, attacking religious pilgrims, and otherwise targeting religious gatherings to commit their massacres. On the other hand, as an article in today's New York Times points out, soccer matches seem to be sacrosanct:

Soccer is so beloved here that even Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which claims ties to Osama bin Laden’s group, has not dared to emulate Mr. bin Laden’s theologically based contempt for the game. Matches in Iraq are one of the few types of public gatherings that have never become a target for suicide bombers.

=> The article focuses on the latest troubles of the long-suffering Iraqi soccer team:

The International Federation of Association Football, known by its French acronym, FIFA, suspended Iraq’s soccer team on Friday, charging the government with interference in the affairs of the board that oversees the national team.

Judging from the information in the article, there appear to be good grounds for this action. However, I can't help reflecting that back during the Ba'ath regime, when Iraqi soccer was under the direct control of Saddam Hussein's murderous and psychopathic son Uday--who, among other things, used to have players beaten or tortured when they lost--no one at FIFA seemed to think this was a problem.

A few more prevalent linguistic errors

As long as we're on the subject of distressingly common linguistic barbarisms, many of which are also logically fallacious, here are three more that I notice have increasingly infected writing and conversation over the past few decades.

(1) It is remarkably common for people to use formulations along the lines of "more X than anyone" or "more X than anything" when simple logic should tell them they really must mean "more X than anyone or anything else".

(2) It has also become increasingly common for people to say "hone in" when the expression they're really groping for is "home in". I suspect that a phonological slippage from "home" to "hone" is part of the explanation, and I also suspect that part of the problem is that many people no longer have any idea what "hone" means. To "hone" something is to sharpen it, as in honing the edge of a knife--or, by metaphorical extension, making something more acute or effective. If you hone your analytical and linguistic skills, you can use them to home in on errors like this one.

(3) And even a great many otherwise intelligent and educated people appear to believe that the phrase "this begs the question" means something along the lines of "this raises the following question" or "this forces us to ask the following question". It doesn't.

Yours for sensible discourse,Jeff Weintraub

P.S. My friend Mark Gerson adds: "Yes – also: 'I could care less'. It’s the precise opposite of what people mean when using the phrase."

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

National Geographic's Best Pictures of the Year - 2009

(Thanks to my father, Sidney Weintraub, for passing these on.)I have to say that these are remarkable, though in different ways. Some are beautiful, some are charming, some are astonishing, and some are all three at once.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Getting it right with "may" and "might" (Oliver Kamm)

Oliver Kamm, in his Pedant column for the London Times, zeroes in on a distressingly common linguistic barbarism that I find as annoying as he does. Even otherwise intelligent and well-educated people often insist on using "may" where they really mean "might" ... and the resulting formulations don't really make sense.

Since Kamm uses some World War II examples in his discussion, let me use two of my own to highlight the essential distinction.

Right: If Hitler had focused on defeating the British in North Africa, instead of gambling everything on his catastrophic invasion of the Soviet Union, he might have won the war.

Wrong: If Hitler had focused on defeating the British in North Africa, instead of gambling everything on his catastrophic invasion of the Soviet Union, he may have won the war.

For Kamm's useful explanation of why the first is right and the second is wrong, see below. But first let me commend this very nice illustrative example he cites:

I have for years kept an excellent example of the correct use of may and might within a single sentence. It comes from a review in The Observer of the second volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler. The reviewer, Peter Conrad, writes (emphasis added): “[Hitler] made up military strategy as he went along and may have lost the war because of muddled tactics: if the Germans had reacted more swiftly on the Normandy beaches, Kershaw reckons, they might have beaten back the Allied invasion."

Perhaps he might have, but now we know for sure that he didn't. Again, for an explanation of why this difference matters grammatically and stylistically, see below.

==============================London Times (Online)
October 19, 2009The Pedant: a way through the maysYou might not have thought much about it, but the difference between may and might is sometimes a very important one
By Oliver Kamm

Sally Baker, the feedback editor of The Times, writes a weekly column responding to readers’ letters. She plaintively referred last week to the “greatest mystery of them all”. This is that The Times continually fails to distinguish properly between “may” and “might”.

She is right. There is no excuse for using the words interchangeably. Judging by Sally’s correspondence, Times readers know this, whereas Times writers don’t. So this column is a plea to my colleagues to get it right.

Our sports pages last week carried this fascinating speculation in an article about tennis: “As far-fetched as it might seem, [Novak] Djokovic and Andy Murray may have become team-mates. Indeed, only Djokovic’s devotion to Serbia ... prevented what would have been the liaison to end all tennis liaisons.”

Even if you know nothing about tennis (which is, ahem, close to my own position), you can work out from the second sentence that the first cannot be right. The word “might” is used correctly in the first sentence. But then to say that Djokovic and Murray “may have become” team-mates indicates that it is an open question whether they did or not. But it isn’t. We know that Murray and Djokovic didn’t become team-mates, because Djokovic chose to represent Serbia rather than Britain. There was such a possibility in the past, but it doesn’t exist now. The right way to say this is that Djokovic and Murray might (not may) have become team-mates; but they didn’t.

I have for years kept an excellent example of the correct use of may and might within a single sentence. It comes from a review in The Observer of the second volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler. The reviewer, Peter Conrad, writes (emphasis added): “[Hitler] made up military strategy as he went along and may have lost the war because of muddled tactics: if the Germans had reacted more swiftly on the Normandy beaches, Kershaw reckons, they might have beaten back the Allied invasion.”

It is possible that the Nazis’ defeat in the Second World War was due to muddled tactics (rather than, say, superior Allied force). Those tactics may have lost them the war: we don’t know. But the Nazis certainly did not beat back the Allied invasion on the Normandy beaches. That possibility was once open (according to Kershaw’s book), but it never happened. So the Nazis might have repelled the Allies. Fortunately, they didn’t. And it should be clear, from the difference between how the world is and how it might have been, that the difference of meaning between may and might matters.

Too many Jews (Norman Geras)

Certain types of genteel anti-semitism (and of anti-Zionism-sliding-into-anti-semitism) have become so pervasive and respectable in broad sectors of mainstream public discourse in Britain that they scarcely raise an eyebrow. And people who have the temerity to notice this often provoke, at the very least, the kinds of angry and dismissive abuse once directed at early feminists when they complained about taken-for-granted sexism. (Of course, less genteel varieties of anti-semitism and/or hysterical anti-Zionism aren't so uncommon in some circles, but so far they are not quite so respectable--though they are often treated as "understandable.")

Norman Geras (following Marcus at Harry's Place) draws our attention to a typical but illuminating example. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, writing in a major 'progressive' British newspaper, suggests in a tone of hortatory and unembarrassed 'realism' that a public committee of inquiry dealing with Iraq (not even with Israel or the Arab-Israeli conflict, but with the 2003 Iraq war) is not "balanced" if it has ... too many Jews. The underlying premises at work here are worth pondering.

Many Europeans who think like Oliver Miles find it mystifying, even a bit scandalous, that this sort of genteel anti-semitism is not considered as mainstream and respectable in the US as it is in a lot of western European countries. Indeed, Miles complains about this in his piece. Frankly, I don't think Americans are the ones who should be embarrassed about this comparison.

--Jeff Weintraub

(P.S. As Jonathan Hoffman points out at Harry's Place, Oliver Miles's piece in the Independent fails to disclose that he is a prominent member of "the Libyan-British Business Council, co-bankrolled by the UK and Libyan governments. Miles is the Chairman of the lobbying group MEC International, which has organised the most recent project of the LBBC, including producing a report for the EU offering very rosy prospects for EU trade with Libya." In other words, Miles is not just a professional Arabist but, effectively, a paid lobbyist as well. Nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as it is honestly declared--which, in this case, it wasn't.)==============================Norman Geras (normblog)November 22, 2009Too many Jews

For the second time (the second time that I know of, that is), someone writing in the Independent thinks it is a matter of note that two members of the committee that will conduct the inquiry into the Iraq war are Jewish. On this occasion the person making the point is Oliver Miles:

Rather less attention has been paid to the curious appointment of two historians (which seems a lot, out of a total of five), both strong supporters of Tony Blair and/or the Iraq war... Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism. Such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream British and American media, but The Jewish Chronicle and the Israeli media have no such inhibitions, and the Arabic media both in London and in the region are usually not far behind... Membership should not only be balanced; it should be seen to be balanced.

[JW:This interesting formulation could mean one of two things. Either (a) pervasive anti-semitism in the Arab world, along with widely believed conspiratorial fantasies about how the 2003 Iraq war was somehow a "Zionist" plot, should be accepted by the British government as disqualifying Jews from serving in any public capacity directly or indirectly related to the Middle East. Or, more probably, (b) these Arab suspicions are actually quite sensible and legitimate. Jews, and especially any Jew who openly supports Israel's right to exist (i.e., with "a record of active support for Zionism"--horrors!), should obviously be blacklisted, or at least regarded as prima facie suspect and undesirable. Noisily anti-Zionist Jews might be OK. And, if all else fails, the proportion of Jews on such panels can be limited by sensible quotas. Isn't that just obvious common sense?]

One is bound to conclude that for Miles balance in this matter relates not only to the views of members of the committee about the Iraq war, and not only to whether or not they are historians (I mean, why on earth not equal representation for pianists and jugglers?) but also to the disproportionate number of Jews. If not, why does he think this fact worth pointing out? That the Jewish Chronicle has no inhibitions about mentioning it is neither here nor there, since the Jewish Chronicle won't be purveying the innuendo that 40 per cent Jews is too many Jews. And that the Arabic media have no inhibitions doesn't help Miles for a different reason; because the Arab media may well have some such thought in mind. But Miles is unabashed. He's jolly well going to go right ahead and intimate that two Jews is too many Jews.

When those of us who worry about the growth of anti-Semitism in this country express our worry, there's never any shortage of sceptics. 'What, anti-Semitism? Are you sure? Where's the evidence? You're just trying to dodge some perfectly legitimate criticisms of Israel... [etc]' A national newspaper now thinks nothing of giving house room to the proposal that there has to be a 'balance' as regards Jews. And that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is how few people care within the body of opinion - liberal, progressive - that really ought to care, that flatters itself that it is anti-racist.

The worst of it is that when Jews protest, making representations to media outlets over broadcast material they think objectionable, then they're charged with engaging in a darkly subterranean and well-funded form of media domination. This charge, too, supposedly has nothing to do with anti-Semitism (despite what it has in common with a very old and familiar anti-Semitic trope); it's merely an effort towards openness and transparency. Yet for Jews to press the issues that matter to them is somehow unacceptable. There has been a precipitate deterioration in public discourse in this area in the last few years. Only those who aren't interested will have missed it. (Via Harry's Place.)

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Crunch time in the Senate (E.J. Dionne)

The upcoming Senate vote on whether to cut off a Republican filibuster of the health care reform bill has been looming as a moment of legislative high drama. Quite aside from the merits of the bill itself, this vote shapes up as a crucial test for the essentially monolithic strategy of all-out obstructionism (applied across the board, not just with respect to this bill) that the Congressional Republicans have pursued, with considerable skill and success, ever since Obama's inauguration. Will they be able to prevent the health care bill from even reaching the floor for debate?

Probably not (according to the latest speculation by the best-informed political junkies). But it's going to be a squeaker, and we won't know for sure until the actual voting later tonight.

One of the reasons that the Congressional Republicans have been able to get away with this strategy of unrelenting obstructionism without seeming to pay significant political costs for it--at least, so far--is that many people (including many alleged political journalists) don't seem to have a clear grasp of what's going on. So a recent Washington Post column by E.J. Dionne, written a few days before this Senate showdown, performed a useful service by explaining this political background and its implications.

Democrats in the Senate -- the House is not the problem -- need to have a long chat with themselves and decide whether they want to engage in an act of collective suicide.

But it's also time to start paying attention to how Republicans, with Machiavellian brilliance, have hit upon what might be called the Beltway-at-Rush-Hour Strategy, aimed at snarling legislative traffic to a standstill so Democrats have no hope of reaching the next exit. [....]

Republicans know one other thing: Practically nobody is noticing their delay-to-kill strategy. Who wants to discuss legislative procedure when there's so much fun and profit in psychoanalyzing Sarah Palin? [....]

Republicans are using the filibuster to stall action even on bills that most of them support. Remember: The rule is to keep Democrats from ever reaching the exit.

As of last Monday, the Senate majority had filed 58 cloture motions requiring 32 recorded votes. One of the more outrageous cases involved an extension in unemployment benefits, a no-brainer in light of the dismal economy. The bill ultimately cleared the Senate this month by 98 to 0. [....]

The filibuster is not a new practice (though it was certainly never contemplated by the Founding Fathers). It evolved over time as a last-ditch tool for Senate minorities to use in exceptional situations. But the filibuster (and a range of other stalling devices) have never been used so routinely and promiscuously as the Republicans have been using them in this Congress.

The rules have changed. The extra-constitutional filibuster is being used by the minority, with extraordinary success, to make the majority look foolish, ineffectual and incompetent.

If the Democrats can't manage to clear this hurdle tonight, that probably means they should just give up, fold their tents, and go home. Meanwhile, read Dionne's whole piece (below).

Normal human beings -- let's call them real Americans -- cannot understand why, 10 months after President Obama's inauguration, Congress is still tied down in a procedural torture chamber trying to pass the health-care bill Obama promised in his campaign.

Last year, the voters gave him the largest popular-vote margin won by a presidential candidate in 20 years. They gave Democrats their largest Senate majority since 1976 and their largest House majority since 1992.

Obama didn't just offer bromides about hope and change. He made specific pledges. You'd think that the newly empowered Democrats would want to deliver quickly.

But what do real Americans see? On health care, they read about this or that Democratic senator prepared to bring action to a screeching halt out of displeasure with some aspect of the proposal. They first hear that a bill will pass by Thanksgiving and then learn it might not get a final vote until after the new year.

Is it any wonder that Congress has miserable approval ratings? Is it surprising that independents, who want their government to solve a few problems, are becoming impatient with the current majority?

Democrats in the Senate -- the House is not the problem -- need to have a long chat with themselves and decide whether they want to engage in an act of collective suicide.

But it's also time to start paying attention to how Republicans, with Machiavellian brilliance, have hit upon what might be called the Beltway-at-Rush-Hour Strategy, aimed at snarling legislative traffic to a standstill so Democrats have no hope of reaching the next exit.

We know what happens when drivers just sit there when they're supposed to be moving. They get grumpy, irascible and start turning on each other, which is exactly what the Democrats are doing.

Republicans know one other thing: Practically nobody is noticing their delay-to-kill strategy. Who wants to discuss legislative procedure when there's so much fun and profit in psychoanalyzing Sarah Palin?

Yet there was a small break in the Curtain of Obstruction this week when Republican senators unashamedly ate every word they had spoken when George W. Bush was in power about the horrors of filibustering nominees for federal judgeships. On Tuesday, a majority of Republicans tried to block a vote on the appointment of David F. Hamilton, a rather moderate jurist, to a federal appeals court.

That was actually a helpful comment, because the Republicans have changed the rules on Senate action up and down the line. Hamilton's case is just the one instance that finally got a little play.

Thankfully, this filibuster failed because some Republicans were embarrassed by it. But Republican delaying tactics have made Obama far too wary about judicial nominations for fear of controversy. He is well behind his predecessor in filling vacancies, a shameful capitulation to obstruction. There's also the fact that the nomination of Christopher Schroeder as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, which helps to vet judges, is snarled -- guess where? -- in the Senate.

Republicans are using the filibuster to stall action even on bills that most of them support. Remember: The rule is to keep Democrats from ever reaching the exit.

As of last Monday, the Senate majority had filed 58 cloture motions requiring 32 recorded votes. One of the more outrageous cases involved an extension in unemployment benefits, a no-brainer in light of the dismal economy. The bill ultimately cleared the Senate this month by 98 to 0.

The vote came only after the Republicans launched three filibusters against the bill and tried to lard it with unrelated amendments, delaying passage by nearly a month. And you wonder why it's so hard to pass health care?

Defenders of the Senate always say the Founders envisioned it as a deliberative body that would cool the passions of the House. But Sessions unintentionally blew the whistle on how what's happening now has nothing to do with the Founders' design.

The rules have changed. The extra-constitutional filibuster is being used by the minority, with extraordinary success, to make the majority look foolish, ineffectual and incompetent. By using Republican obstructionism as a vehicle for forcing through their own narrow agendas, supposedly moderate Democratic senators will only make themselves complicit in this humiliation.

More mysteries of Afghan public opinion (via Mark Kleiman)

Mark pointed out that the results of the Asia Foundation survey raise some interesting questions. In the US and Europe, current discussions about Afghanistan take for granted a situation of crisis and impending catastrophe (for which some evidence does, indeed, exist). But the responses to the Asia Foundation's survey suggest that most Afghans feel the situation in their country (though terrible) is actually improving. For example:

• In 2009, 42 percent of respondents say that the country is moving in the right direction.This figure is higher than in 2008 (38%). Similarly, 29 percent feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction compared to 32 percent in 2008, signaling a check on the trend of declining optimism that had been evident since 2006.• The main reason for optimism continues to be good security which has been mentioned by an increasing proportion of respondents each year, from 31 percent in 2006 to 44 percent in 2009. More respondents in 2009 also mention reconstruction and rebuilding (36%) and opening of schools for girls (21%) as reasons for optimism than in previous years.

And so on. Of course, responses varied significantly between different parts of the country (and thus, presumably, between different ethnic groups). Still, as Mark (correctly) observed:

Maybe things have gotten worse since the summer [JW: the election debacle can't have helped matters], but this is hardly the picture of hopelessness I’ve been getting from the newspapers.

What should be make of this--if anything? I'm not sure. But these somewhat counter-intuitive polling results (see the rest of Mark's post below) may help remind us of how complex, multi-leveled, murky, and uncertain the situation in Afghanistan actually is. So we should probably be cautious about jumping to conclusions, and perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to panic, either (though only a fool would feel complacent).

• In 2009, 42 percent of respondents say that the country is moving in the right direction.This figure is higher than in 2008 (38%). Similarly, 29 percent feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction compared to 32 percent in 2008, signaling a check on the trend of declining optimism that had been evident since 2006.

• The main reason for optimism continues to be good security which has been mentioned by an increasing proportion of respondents each year, from 31 percent in 2006 to 44 percent in 2009. More respondents in 2009 also mention reconstruction and rebuilding (36%) and opening of schools for girls (21%) as reasons for optimism than in previous years.

• Insecurity also remains the most important reason for pessimism, cited by 42 percent of respondents. However, the proportion of respondents that highlight insecurity in 2009 has fallen since 2008 when half of respondents (50%) emphasized this factor.

• Insecurity (including attacks, violence and terrorism) is identified as the biggest problem in Afghanistan by over a third of respondents (36%), particularly in the South East (48%), West (44%) and South West (41%). However, concern about other issues such as unemployment (35%), poor economy (20%), corruption (17%), poverty (11%) and education (11%) has increased in 2009 compared to 2008.

Maybe things have gotten worse since the summer, but this is hardly the picture of hopelessness I’ve been getting from the newspapers.

Oxfam poll: Afghans want an exit from 30 years of endless war

Ever since the overthrow of Daoud Khan's regime by the Afghan Communists in 1978 touched off a civil war, leading in turn to a Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghans have lived through three decades of continual war, devastation, and other horrors. For most Afghans, conditions now are better than they were during the 1980s and 1990s (when, among other things, about a million Afghans died and millions more fled the country). But things are still terrible, and right now prospects for peace and reconstruction are not encouraging.

As Sprung says, this Oxfam survey "reveals untold suffering--1 in 5 say they've been tortured, three quarters have been forced to leave their homes at some point in the endless civil war, 43% have had property destroyed." At the same time, bad as things are right now, "after 30 years of civil war, only 3% named the current conflict as the most harmful period (though the report cautions that areas where the current fighting is worst are underrepresented)." But that's just the starting-point.

Of course, one always has to approach survey results with caution, especially in war-torn and technologically backward societies, and in this case (as noted) there is the special complication that the parts of Afghanistan currently experiencing the most violence are probably under-represented. But the overall patterns in Afghans' responses here largely accord with information available from other sources, and in some cases they bring out the implications more fully and vividly.

Sprung's useful and intelligent overview of the Oxfam report (interspersed with some of my own remarks) is below. It's worth reading.

An Oxfam poll of 704 randomly selected Afghans reveals untold suffering--1 in 5 say they've been tortured, three quarters have been forced to leave their homes at some point in the endless civil war, 43% have had property destroyed.

[JW:Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those surveyed are sick of this and wish it would end. What factors do they think are most important in keeping the conflict going now?]

The survey also has what would seem to be some moderately encouraging findings regarding the counterinsurgency: 70% see unemployment and poverty as a key driver of civil war; 48% blame the government's weakness and corruption; 36% point to the Taliban; 25% to interference by neighboring countries; just 18% to the presence of international forces; another 18% to al Qaeda--and another 17% to the lack of support from the international community.

[JW:These responses offer a lot of food for thought. For the moment, I will just highlight one point that accords with what we know from other sources about the attitudes of ordinary Afghans: Only a small minority of Afghans believe that the presence of US & allied forces is a major factor driving and prolonging the civil war, or that pulling out those foreign troops would miraculously bring the violence to an end. Thus, it is probably not surprising that despite increasing unhappiness about declining security and inadequate reconstruction, and despite widespread complaints and resentments about specific actions by US & allied forces, all the polling results and other relevant information I've seen indicate that most Afghans still support the continued presence of these forces. It's a general rule that, at some point, foreign troops eventually overstay their welcome anywhere, even if they were greeted warmly at first (as they were by most Afghans in 2001); but despite everything, this point hasn't yet been reached in Afghanistan (see, e.g., question #27 here).

(There may be good reasons to argue that, at this point, it is in Americans' interest to pull the plug and abandon Afghanistan--that's a separate discussion--but one shouldn't pretend that this is what most Afghans want.)

Also, before that initial catalogue of long-term suffering and catastrophe leaves us entirely depressed and despairing, here's another point that is worth re-emphasizing:]

After 30 years of civil war, only 3% named the current conflict as the most harmful period (though the report cautions that areas where the current fighting is worst are underrepresented).

[JW:The problem is that in substantial portions of Afghanistan, the situation seems to be getting worse rather than better. So the question is whether and how a downward spiral can be avoided--and what the US, in particular, can and should do to help avert disaster. Those are matters for long, difficult, and complicated discussion. But in the meantime, what would the Afghans surveyed by Oxfam like to see happen?:]

The Oxfam recommendations, channeled through selected comments of the surveyed Afghans, are not surprisingly a mirror of McChrystal's stated goals and strategies: provide not only more aid but more effective aid; root out Afghan government corruption; stop killing civilians via airstrikes; desist from invasive and violence house searches; hold coalition forces that kill or abuse the population accountable for their actions; respect the local culture.]

In the abstract, it's hard to disagree. But can these policies actually be made to work, and would they actually improve matters in the long run--or would they amount, in the end, to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? As I said, those are matters for separate discussion.

=> What's more interesting is that Oxfam, channeling its Afghan respondents, also has some recommendations for the Taliban:]

Oxfam adds "recommendations" for the Taliban, delivered deadpan, without irony--which in a sense produces its own irony. Most western observers are hyper-conscious by now that killing civilians undermines support; but both the survey numbers and the quoted comments make it clear that the Taliban's wanton killings make it less popular than the coalition forces or the government. Likewise, what seems a bold speculative move to some western strategists comes across as a weary necessity from Afghan civilians:

Our message to the Taliban is that they should take part in the government - Male, Herat

The Taliban should not fight; they should express their demands through dialogue - Male, Kabul

Our message to the Taliban is that if they are really Muslim, then why are they fighting against the government since the government is also an Islamic government? - Male, Baikh

[JW: Neither Afghans nor the rest of us should hold our breaths waiting for the Taliban to take this advice.]

One gets the impression that the Afghans have no illusions about their government, and also no illusions about the Taliban. They are more war weary than we can fathom--and like Richard Holbrooke, they will know success--any modicum of peace, justice and development--when they see it . Or rather, they would know it if they were ever to see it. They were apparently not surveyed as to hopes.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Selfish egoism and mutual indifference as a political creed ...

... or, what Republican opponents of health care reform really believe, deep down--once we get past the cynical demagoguery about "death panels" and the pseudo-concern about "pulling the plug on Grandma".

I happened to be reminded today of this exchange between Senators Jon Kyl of Arizona and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan (on September 25, 2009), which I thought at the time was one of the most deeply revelatory moments in the whole health care debate.

--Jeff Weintraub

(P.S. To anticipate one possible reaction: Of course, there are a lot of serious and legitimate questions to be raised about how the dysfunctional US health care system can and should be reformed. And accepting the basic principle that in a decent society we have some mutual responsibilities toward each other is compatible with a range of possible constructive alternatives to the specific proposals embodied in the highly imperfect bills emerging from the legislative sausage-grinder.

But no serious person can pretend that either the Congressional Republicans or major Republican figures outside Congress, with the partial exception of some retired ex-officeholders like Bob Dole or Bill Frist, have actually tried to enter into an honest or constructive debate about how to implement serious reform. Instead, they have almost monolithically pursued a strategy of pure obstructionism--though few have been willing to acknowledge and advocate this as openly as, say, Bill Kristol--supplemented by systematic dishonesty, hypocrisy, and cynical fear-mongering. Some Republican and/or conservative readers may find that judgment a bit harsh, but facts are facts.)

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Jon Stewart does Glenn Beck

I just ran across John Stewart's hilarious parody of the right-wing nutcase-pundit Glenn Beck. To fully appreciate it, though, it helps if you've actually seen Beck's TV show on Fox "News". If you have--once or twice is enough--you will realize that Stewart isn't really exaggerating that much in his imitation of Beck's characteristic loopy paranoid-conspiratorial style.

Then here is Beck himself, trying to strike a serious and reflective note in a Fox News discussion (July 29, 2009). This is beyond parody:

"This President has exposed himself, I think, as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture--I don't know what it is." Well, what about Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and all the other white people who happen to be closely associated with Obama? "I'm not saying he doesn't like white people, I'm saying he has a problem. .... This guy is, I believe, a racist." Etc.

Humor aside, what's genuinely appalling is that millions of people don't just watch Glenn Beck's TV show but apparently take him and his poisonous nonsense seriously. He may be a joke, but it's a bad joke.

=> Of course, some people respond that its unfair and disingenuous to pick on Glenn Beck, since there are equally outrageous and irresponsible prominent TV pundits on the pro-Democratic, left-liberal side of the mass media spectrum. The example most often mentioned is MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. But--how can I put this delicately?--that's silly. If Olbermann is the best counter-example they can find, that just underlines the asymmetry involved.

Yes, Olbermann is unapologetically partisan--which by itself isn't necessarily a bad thing--and he can get overheated, self-important, and tendentious in a way that I sometimes find irritating and objectionable myself. Nor is that purely a matter of bashing Republicans. During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, the persistent anti-Clinton and pro-Obama bias displayed by both Olbermann and Chris Matthews on MSNBC was pretty disgusting. But there's a fundamentally serious core to Olbermann, even when he gets carried away, and there's an important difference of degree between being a bit tendentious and being a crackpot fantasist unmoored from reality. In my humble opinion, anyone who doesn't recognize that Glenn Beck falls in the second category is fooling himself or herself, and trying to make excuses for Glenn Beck by equating him with Keith Olbermann is a case of mindless moral equivalence run amok.

A surprise father-daughter reunion

A very moving video clip that has been making the rounds. I've watched it several times, not least because the vividness and complexity of the emotions displayed here are fascinating. This is what the expression "overcome by emotion" actually means.

Saturday, November 07, 2009

“That the race and name of that people may be annihilated” (with Mark Kleiman)

[This originated in an e-mail exchange with Mark Kleiman (of The Reality-Based Community) provoked by a passing remark he made in a post about Simon de Montfort, regarded by one tradition as the "Father of Parliament" in England. Mark noted that, if one goes with that account, "it’s not hard to find irony in the fact that de Montfort’s father (also named Simon) was one of the military leaders of the crusade against the Albigenses, perhaps the first action in European history that deserves to be called genocide."

Leaving the de Montforts aside ... alas, this was not really "the first action in European history that deserves to be called genocide." Unfortunately, it's not hard to think of previous examples, but in particular I mentioned one episode from Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars that "has always struck me as particularly chilling." Mark was good enough to post part of this exchange on his blog (by mutual agreement). --Jeff Weintraub]

I spoke too loosely in describing the extirpation of the Albigenses as the first genocide in European history. It would have been more precise to say “post-Classical European history,” as a Jeff Weintraub points out:-------------------------One passage in Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars has always struck me as particularly chilling. In Book 6 Caesar describes how he defeated a string of revolts, culminating in the great rebellion led by Vercingetorix. One of those was the revolt of the Eburones, a Belgic tribe, led by a certain Ambiorix. They managed to ambush and either wipe out or devastate several units of Roman soldiers. When Caesar arrived with his main army, looking for revenge, Ambiorix fled across the Rhine, and the rest of the Eburones scattered into the forests for safety. Caesar writes:

There was, as we have above observed, no regular army, nor a town, nor a garrison which could defend itself by arms; but the people were scattered in all directions. Where either a hidden valley, or a woody spot, or a difficult morass furnished any hope of protection or of security to any one, there he had fixed himself. These places were known to those who dwelt in the neighborhood, and the matter demanded great attention, not so much in protecting the main body of the army (for no peril could occur to them altogether from those alarmed and scattered troops), as in preserving individual soldiers; which in some measure tended to the safety of the army. [.....]

Caesar dispatches messengers to the neighboring peoples [civitates]; by the hope of booty he invites all to him, for the purpose of plundering the Eburones, in order that the life of the Gauls might be hazarded in the woods rather than the legionary soldiers; at the same time, in order that a large force being drawn around them, the race and name of that people may be annihilated [stirps ac nomen civitatis tollatur] for such a crime. A large number from all quarters speedily assembles. [.....]

We still have the name of the Eburones, thanks to Caesar. But as for the Eburones themselves, my impression is that as a people they were indeed effectively destroyed, and their territory was taken over by other neighboring tribes. (Or perhaps Caesar was boasting about a genocidal mass murder he didn’t fully accomplish? Either way, as I said, I’ve always found that passage a bit chilling.)

We should note that this particular episode had nothing to do with religion. Caesar was mostly just trying to make a point.

Also note that De Bello Gallico was not intended only as an historical account. It was also a public-relations document highlighting Caesar’s military triumphs on behalf of the republic. It might even be called a campaign document, since top figures in the Roman political elite were, effectively, involved in a never-ending “campaign.” In that context, the matter-of-fact tone in which Caesar announces his intention that “the race and name of that people may be annihilated” is especially striking. There is no trace of embarrassment, euphemism, or circumlocution about it.-------------------------

So it’s fair to say that there has been some moral progress in 2000 years. At least, modern advocates of genocide tend to use euphemisms.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

[An e-mail message to Norman Geras that he guest-posted on Normblog. This began with Norm's post responding to a column by Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph.]

Hi Norm,

In your post "The human condition has been around for ages" you nicely picked up on Janet Daley's confusion. If I were a Marxist, I might even go further than mere "confusion" and describe her statement as a typical example of a certain type of widespread ideological mystification.

But in some ways I thought your interpretation of her remarks was actually too generous. You said:

Daley surely wouldn't want to assert that the human condition, with its mix of vices and virtues, was absent from pre-capitalist or other non-capitalist social formations. Did, and do, the denizens of non-capitalist societies not experience such features of the human condition as birth and death, joy and grief, love, hatred, illness, old age, indigestion and that dream where you're trying to get away from some looming threat and your legs just won't move fast enough, if they'll move at all? What Daley means to say, I think, is not that capitalism is just the human condition, as if other types of society might not be the human condition, but that capitalism is the optimal form of society for bringing out the best in human nature.

My guess is that she really did mean to say that capitalism just is "the human condition"--unless it is artificially and/or coercively interfered with. This comes out even more clearly, I think, if one quotes the key sentence from her piece without ellipses:

Properly speaking, capitalism is not a system at all (which is why most of its supporters prefer the term "free market economics"): it is just the human condition in economic form.

You talk about "pre-capitalist or other non-capitalist social formations," but that takes for granted precisely what Daley would probably deny or find baffling--i.e., the idea that, even before 20th-century Communism, there were coherent non-capitalist socio-economic systems that could be seen as alternatives to a capitalist market economy, rather than simply imperfect or underdeveloped forms of a capitalist market economy. As Daley says, capitalism is not just one system among other systems. It is human nature unleashed.

In this respect, the mentality I am attributing to Daley is actually very widespread in the modern world (whether or not the people who hold it could or would spell it out explicitly). And people who think this way have a powerful and respectable theoretical warrant for their perspective, whether or not they are fully aware of its origin.

What I'm talking about is what might be called everyday Smithianism. (This is largely equivalent to economic liberalism, in the proper 19th-century sense of that phrase, but to avoid distracting details I will just refer to the interlocking visions of human nature and social order laid out by Adam Smith in Books I-II of The Wealth of Nations.)

Smith is actually a very complex, interesting, and illuminating social theorist--more than most Smithians, in fact--so one shouldn't oversimplify or casually dismiss him. But in the core doctrine of The Wealth of Nations he did offer one of the most powerful and systematic arguments in favor of the propositions that the market economy and market activity are "natural" and--unless 'artificially' interfered with--also universal and trans-historical, not least because they're rooted in central and trans-historical features of human nature. ("Natural" is the word that Smith himself uses, repeatedly and systematically.) With variations in detail and explicit terminology, these beliefs are at the heart of an orientation that for centuries now has been one of the most durable, pervasive, and influential theoretical and ideological perspectives in the modern world.

This Smithian perspective is important and worth taking seriously, and in certain circumstances it can even help illuminate important aspects of social and historical reality. But, like you (and Marx), I believe that, taken as a whole, it's oversimplified, incorrect, and profoundly misleading (theoretically, historically, practically, etc).

However, it is also important to recognize that for a great many people (including, over the years, a lot of vulgar Marxists) this perspective and its central premises look like obvious common sense and/or the deepest and most sophisticated theory. That is, if you just clear away 'artificial' obstacles to individual action and the free expression of the defining propensities of human nature, something like "free market economics" spontaneously emerges.

(And one doesn't have to go to the Daily Telegraph to find these underlying assumptions. This is a pervasive phenomenon, of which I will offer one small academic example. I've recently been having a small exchange with a friend of mine, an archaeologist, about the latest fashions in the economic archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, which seem to involve yet another of the perennial resurgences of Smithianism. Nowadays a lot of archaeologists working on such issues--including the kinds of ex-Marxists or semi-post-Marxists who have gone "post-modern"--see themselves as reacting against the kinds of positions they attribute to Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley as those were caricatured in the misbegotten "formalist vs substantivist" debates in economic anthropology and economic history. Both Polanyi and Finley had appropriately pointed out that it is wildly misleading to simply equate "economic" activity with market activity and to treat all past socio-economic formations as though they were simply imperfect or rudimentary market economies. The latest fashion is to dismiss this sensible perspective as 'primitivist', and instead to keep repeating the brilliant point that even back in the Bronze Age one can find examples of people engaged in exchanges, trucking and bartering, using money, and acting intelligently--as though any of that had ever been the point of the argument. In short, straightforward vulgar Smithianism is once again being triumphantly rediscovered and trotted out as super-sophisticated innovative wisdom--or so it appears to me. Of course, I'm not questioning any specific archaeological analyses, which would obviously be far beyond my expertise, just the larger theoretical and ideological orientations that inform how the implications are interpreted.)

In short... does Daley really believe "that capitalism is just the human condition"? Probably.

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research, He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)